They Were There

Cuba, Vietnam. Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, Somalia, Iraq. Let our friends, allies and the innocents die, by the millions if necessary. Just so long as they are not Americans. We are the Democratic Party, and for 50 years, from the Bay of Pigs to the Basra Highway and beyond, we have never met a fight we could not pressure our government to run away from, or friends and allies we could not abandon. It's the story of our generation. Only the French are more defeatist than we, but together America, we can change that and become number one. And its change we can believe in. Come on America, and vote Democrat. Together, we can re-live that pride we haven't felt since the 1970's. If we just blindly pull together, we really can make this like it is Jimmy Carter's lost second term. Yes we can!

I can remember watching television on April 4th, 1968 with my brother Steve when a special bulletin announced the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember him innocently asking my mother if she thought it would be the headline in the following day's paper. I can also recall hearing the words "cerfew" and "riot" on the radio and learning what they meant. I know my mother told me MLK, Jr. was a good man.

I was with my family on vacation in Texas on the way to my great-grandmother's house. We were traveling in a little 1962 Chevy II station wagon. It was later in the evening because it was cooler (the car had no air-conditioner) and I remember the radio suddenly announced that Robert Kennedy had been shot. I don't really remember the adults discussing the matter in the car the remainder of the trip, but the next day as I sat watching the news with my 78-year old great-grandmother, she mentioned she also had experienced some of the pain the Kennedys must have felt. My grandmother's youngest son had died the previous August in a
brawl over a woman and her daughter had committed suicide in 1953. I suppose the news had reopened wounds never quited healed in my grandmother as she herself would enter the hospital later that summer with congestive heart failure. I remember going to see her in her hospital room before continuing our vacation to my paternal grandfather's house on the gulf coast . It was there while visiting that we recieved word that she had died. We packed up and went back to the little town she had lived (Holiday, Tx)
and said goodbye.
From there we went back to my aunt's house in eastern New Mexico to stay for a few days before going home to Las Vegas, NV. My 17 year old cousin, Billy wanted to come and stay a couple of weeks with us as my oldest brother and he were just a year apart and were close. My middle brother, Steve was to have a 15th birthday party in the mountains north of Las Vegas on July 23. My brother John and a couple other boys were in the cab of a pick-up truck with Steve and Billy in the bed of the truck. I was riding in a separate car with a family friend behind the pick-up. It was on the way to Mt. Charleston when the truck flipped over and threw the boys in the back out, severly injuring my brother and killing my cousin Billy. I remember my mother screamed when she heard. I have not been to Mt. Charleston since.

Later that summer, my first girlfriend moved with her family back to Ohio.

Christmas 1968 was one of my favorite memories as we spent it in northern New Mexico at my aunt Pat and uncle Jack's house. I had never seen so much snow. My 16-year old brother John played Santa and my brother Steve was physically recovered. On Christmas Eve, I remember watching the newscat of Apollo 8 and the reading from Genesis by the astronauts. Things were looking up. I was 11 years old and I remember it all.